Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence — cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.

Exciting new music trends will continue to emerge, but increasingly they will arrive from outside the major Anglo-American urban centers that previously determined what songs people heard. We have already seen the first signs of this with the global spread of K-Pop and the vitality of the Eurovision competition, but these are merely a start in the power shift away from Los Angeles, New York, and London. So get ready for A-Pop from Africa, I-Pop from India or Indonesia, and a whole host of competing sounds and styles from Latin America, China, Eastern Europe, etc.

What’s odd about literature is that a mind immersed in fantasy appears ripe for fixing by natural selection, since it always leads to erroneous beliefs and distracts from reality. Wouldn’t a daydreaming hunter-gatherer be easy pray for a predator on the African Savannah? It turns out that our ability to invent and tell stories might be a key adaptation that significantly distinguished our species.

This resonates (at least in my warped mind) with the Great Danish Philisopher when he quipped:

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other clause—that it must be lived forwards.

The stories allow us to time-travel to that vantage point in the future. I guess.

Published a century ago this spring, the Tractatus is certainly one of the oddest books in the history of logic, structured in an unconventional outline of unspooling pronouncements offered without argument, as well as a demonstration of philosophy’s basic emptiness, and thus the unknowability of reality. All great philosophers claim that theirs is the work that demolishes philosophy, and Wittgenstein is only different in that the Tractatus actually achieves that goal.

Zeigarnik found a quirk of the human mind: When a task is unfinished, we can’t seem to stop thinking about it. We perseverate. Psychologists still argue about why; possibly it’s a kind of constant refresh to keep whatever’s pending from vanishing from our short-term memory, like putting something by the front door at night so you don’t forget to take it with you the next morning.

Whatever the cause, today this is known as the Zeigarnik effect, and psychologists who study task management say it’s part of why so many of us feel perpetually frazzled by the challenge of organizing work and life. When we face all that undone stuff—emails to write, calls to return, people to contact, friends to check in on, memos to draft, children to help—it’s like being a waiter serving a hundred tables at once. If you’ve found yourself in bed at 2 am with your brain screaming at you about that thing you didn’t do, that’s a Zeigarnik moment.

This is how capitalism ends: not with a revolutionary bang, but with an evolutionary whimper. Just as it displaced feudalism gradually, surreptitiously, until one day the bulk of human relations were market-based and feudalism was swept away, so capitalism today is being toppled by a new economic mode: techno-feudalism.

Rien faire comme une bête, lying on the water and look peacefully into the heavens, “being, nothing else, without any further determination and fulfillment” might step in place of process, doing, fulfilling, and so truly deliver the promise of dialectical logic, of culminating in its origin. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to the fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.

— Marshall Berman

On the other hand many of those who recognised the bankruptcy of Leninism fell into a libertarian swamp of lifestylism and total absorption in 'identity politics' etc. Meanwhile from Academia came a sophisticated attack on radical theory in the guise of radical theory. The libertarian critique of Leninism - that it is an attempt to replace one set of rulers with another set - was transformed into an attack on the very project of social revolution. While appearing in their discourse to be exceptionally radical, the political implications of the postmodernists and poststructuralists amount to at best a wet liberalism, while at worst a justification for nationalism and wars.

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

-- Walter Benjamin

For Adorno, reality has become false to the extent that we are no longer able to recognize our participation in constituting it.

Indeed, indeed:

The result is a Kafkaesque affinity between the bureaucratic universe and the social justice universe. Both place their subjects in an opaque, hierarchically-ranked matrix, where jockeying for position involves bitter competition and intense focus on self-presentation; where the rules are ever changing and arbitrarily enforced; and where outcomes have, at best, only the appearance of fairness and rationality.

Historical fiction, by contrast, has not been in fashion. Or, rather, it has been seen as its own fusty fashion, relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like “Prithee!” while having modern-day thoughts, and occasionally encounter villains immediately recognizable by their yellow teeth or suspicious smell. What light could such novels possibly shed on the present day?

The half-century of the “78” adds up to quite a lot of music, most of which has long been inaccessible to non-antiquarians. Enter the historically minded technologists of the Internet Archive, who since 2016 have been working with media preservation company George Blood LP to digitize, preserve, and make available, as of this writing, more than 250,000 such records.

That’s one of the best explanations I’ve seen of how language death happens (beyond the trivial “the last speaker died”), and it makes the inevitability (given the right circumstances) depressingly clear. I realize there are plenty of people who are indifferent to language death — or even welcome it as a step toward that glorious future when we will all speak one language, share the same sociopolitical system, and use the same detergents, and the lion will lie down with the lamb — but I am not one of them.

So very true. How he dances:

He practised them assiduously for another thirteen years before finally feeling able to perform them in public. To do so, he had to evolve new techniques and arrive at an understanding of this remarkable music. He came to espouse a philosophy of performance based upon the principle that no matter how abstracted, stylised and removed this music had become, it was still essentially the music of dance and as such required the performer to invest it with a Terpsichorean vigour, vitality, elegance and grace.

Fascism, the studies argued, is not a sublime evil or a pathology for which there is a simple remedy. It is something far more unsettling: a latent but pervasive feature of bourgeois modernity. With this broadened definition, one could hardly take comfort in the defeat of fascism at the war’s end.

In recent decades, archaeologists and geologists have reanalyzed the evidence about what happened at Angkor. What they found is the truth behind the lost-city myth: Great cities are rarely snuffed out in an instant, nor do they “collapse.” Instead, they transform.

I fully concur:

Much as I am glad to not be turned into a human icicle, the missing drumbeat of home-walk-work-walk-home has been a difficult adaptation. To make matters more monotonous, I am working from the same home office every day because my computer with all of my work stuff is an iMac and it is difficult to drag around. So it doesn’t matter what I am doing — writing email, meeting colleagues, having a quick chat — it all happens in exactly the same place staring at exactly the same screen sitting in exactly the same chair rolling around on exactly the same rug. The rug is a new addition for this year, actually; I thought it would help make my work space feel different and separate. It felt that way for only about a week.

Having ditched my 10-year old MacBook Pro for a spanky Linux laptop, I somewhat concur. I could have done what he says here -- but I wanted a little more luxury. But no more Macs and Windows machines around here.

In 2017, somewhere between getting my office and my website off-the-grid, I decided not to buy any more new laptops. Instead, I switched to a 2006 second-hand machine that I purchased online for 50 euros and which does everything that I want and need. Including a new battery and a simple hardware upgrade, I invested less than 150 euros.

If my 2006 laptop lasts as long as my other machines – if it runs for another 1.7 years – it will have cost me only 26 euros per year. That’s more than 10 times less than the cost of my previous laptops. In this article, I explain my motivation for not buying any more new laptops, and how you could do the same.